Dr Linda Silverman: “If our child is so smart, why aren’t our lives easier?”

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

7:00pm-9:00pm

Westmount Charter School, MH Gymnasium 2215 Uxbridge Drive NW

Fee: $5 (CASH ONLY) per person at the door, open to public.

Note: NO RSVP–limited general seating; first-come, first-served; doors open at 6:30pm.

Synopsis: “Gifted children are expensive and time-consuming. They usually need less sleep than you do, ask more questions than you can answer, want 100 percent of your attention 24 hours a day, have obsessive hobbies, react intensely to everything, endlessly long for a best friend who understands them completely, hold perfectionistic standards for themselves and you, want to know the meaning of life when other children only want to know how to whistle, and keep their bedrooms in a condition you can never show company. In order to be the perfect parent, you need unlimited funds, unlimited patience, an encyclopedic mind, and someone to sleep for you.

In this session, we will be discussing such issues as coping with the characteristics of giftedness; siblings and birth order; gender issues; and keys to successful parenting. You will receive an owner’s manual, “Guidelines for Parents of the Gifted,” which contains suggestions for harmonious family life. There will be a question and answer period, but I don’t have all the answers. Trust Yourself! No one knows your child better than you do. ” LKS

About the Speaker: Linda Kreger Silverman, Ph.D., is a licensed clinical and counseling psychologist.  She directs the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development, and its subsidiaries, the Gifted Development Center [www.gifteddevelopment.com] and Visual-Spatial Resource [www.visualspatial.org], in Denver, Colorado.  In the last 34 years, she has studied over 6,000 children who have been assessed at GDC, the largest data bank on this population. This research enabled the creation of extended norms on the WISC-IV and WPPSI-IV.  Her Ph.D. is in educational psychology and special education from the University of Southern California.  For nine years, she served on the faculty of the University of Denver in counseling psychology and gifted education.  She has been studying the psychology and education of the gifted since 1961 and has written over 300 articles, chapters and books, including Counseling the Gifted and Talented, Upside-Down Brilliance: The Visual-Spatial Learner and Advanced Development:  A Collection of Works on Gifted Adults. Her latest book, Giftedness 101 (New York: Springer, 2013) went into its third printing within six months of its release.